Lout is a high-level language for document formatting. It includes facilities for typesetting complex documents containing floating figures, tables, diagrams, rotated and scaled text or graphics, footnotes, running headers, footers, an index, table of contents and bibliography, cross-references, mathematical equations and statistical graphs. Lout's capabilities can be extended with definitions which are easier to write than similar markup languages.

Lout is multilingual, supporting (with hyphenation) Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Russia, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Some of these languages are available as separate packages because they need more than the 13 standard Adobe fonts. Further languages can be added easily.